There were two sides in this election. One side represented educated, urban, diverse and progressive America. The other represented less educated, rural, white America. Perhaps the good news is that the people who Trump would call “losers” won. We had hoped the more progressive side of this country would win the election and move us towards the more diverse and more connected world that is necessarily coming. But we lost.

But consider where America would be today had Clinton swept the election. I believe that the angry, white, rural and working-class voter would not go away thinking, “Oh well, at least we lost fair and square. That’s how democracy works.” No, they would have fundamentally believed that they had lost another battle in a losing war against them and their world. They would have dug into their trenches. America would have become even more divided. The coming years would be very ugly and perhaps more violent.

Clinton voters (at least most of them) will not go there — even in defeat. There are two reasons for this: First, this election was a battle and not the war. Basic demographics and technological change will continue to favor minorities and the better educated. Making America Great Again is a nice slogan, but you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube. Old-fashioned, low-skill-based manufacturing jobs will never return to American shores. In short, time is on our side.

Secondly, and more importantly, the American center-left can now engage in a thorough and necessary self-evaluation. They will ask themselves, “What did we do wrong?” The obvious answer is that we did not understand the anger and frustration of the people that globalization has left behind. The truth is that globalization has been good for many of us. But the center of America did not prosper in this new world and, quite frankly, upper-middle-class Clinton supporters ignored this story and sometimes even derided those that were left behind.

Instead of going violent and digging into our trenches, I believe that Clinton’s half of America can and will use this loss to rethink where we go from here. I do not believe that the country was ready for Bernie Sanders (not the least because he is a socialist and an atheist). But Bernie was right to push the Democratic party toward policies that would benefit the working class — the very people that voted in droves against the Clinton. Ironically, it was the Republicans’ free-market agenda that was so hard on the center of the country. But the liberal/progressives in the Democratic party did not take advantage of this. Trump did.

The Democratic Party now has an opportunity to return to its roots and also champion those who have not done well in this quickly changing and interconnected world. Instead of deriding those who are falling behind, Democrats can and should recognize them and try to help them in the coming transitions which are, after all, inevitable. If it does so, it can become a party that not only wins elections, but does the right thing.

This will make the Democrats more electable and America a better country.

Sven Steinmo is a professor of political science at CU Boulder and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence, Italy.